For a while it started to look like big content was starting to get the message about the internet – if content is available and cheap enough then people will buy legit copies. Then CBS released Star Trek: Discovery.

Discovery cost about $8 million an episode and there was a huge amount of interest. As it turned out, it got good reviews even from its slightly neurotic fanbase. However CBS appears to have decided to get all proprietary and use the show to push its proprietary streaming service, which will be the exclusive source for later episodes of the new Star Trek series.

CBS hopes this will help the network build CBS All Access into a top-tier streaming service. But what it is really doing is encouraging those who can’t get CBS access to pirate its flagship show. To make matters worse some of those who did sign up to CBS to get the show have been reporting reliability problems.

One user moaned that he was getting 10 minutes of content for 50 minutes of adverts and the server kept crashing. Pirate copies did not have these issues.

It also made it rather difficult for people in foreign parts to see the show. As a result the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery is the twelfth most actively pirated show among users of the Pirate Bay right now, according to the Pirate Bay's list of most downloaded videos. Discovery's second episode isn't far behind, at number 19.

Game of Thrones, has been the internet's most pirated show several years in a row. However, GoT has a huge worldwide fanbase. Its producers did deals to make sure it got the widest simultaneous distribution, cutting down on piracy. CBS did the opposite.

What is worrying is that if the show does take off, CBS might end up pulling it because it is too expensive and does not drag enough people to its streaming network – a network which people don’t want or need.

One thing that the internet should have taught Hollywood is that if you make something difficult to obtain it will be successfully pirated and will do better in that market.

AMD has not had much luck in tablets, that’s no secret and Intel hasn’t exactly done a great job, either. For years mass-market tablets were powered solely by ARM-based chips, but last year Intel upped the ante with Bay Trail-T, arguably the first truly competitive x86 SoC in the tablet space.

This year it’s AMD’s turn. Mullins offers a big improvement over Temash, it delivers a lot more performance and a few new features that make it a lot more attractive than its predecessor. Performance is not an issue, either.

However, having a good product simply isn’t enough.

Why Mullins could succeed where other APUs have failed

Mullins offers vastly superior efficiency compared to Temash. AMD started using the SDP metric last year, in response to Intel’s decision to use SDP for some of its mobile/tablet parts. However, AMD still uses TDP, too.

Mullins parts feature an SDP of 2.8W. AMD previously stated that Mullins would end up with an SDP of ~2W, roughly on a par with Bay Trail-T parts. The actual TDP is of course somewhat higher. Temash parts feature an SDP of 3W to 4W, but the TDP is about 8W. Mullins offers a huge improvement, with an SDP of 2.8W and TDP ranging from 3.95W to 4.5W. Thanks to STAMP and other efficiency tweaks, Mullins can deliver quite a bit more performance than Temash in the same thermal envelope, and then some.

For example, the Temash based A6-1450 packs four Jaguar CPU cores clocked at 1GHz and it can hit 1.4GHz on Turbo. The GPU is clocked at 300MHz, but it clock up to 400MHz on Turbo. However, the Mullins-based A10 Micro-6700T can hit a max CPU clock speed of 2.2GHz, while the GPU can reach 500MHz. This is not only much higher than what Temash was capable of, it is also higher than what we saw on mainstream Kabini APUs with a TDP of 15W, yet the A10 Micro-6700T is a 4.5W part.

'Contra revenue' is Intel’s biggest competitive advantage

AMD has been showing off its Discovery tablet platform for a while, but so far AMD-based tablets have been scarcer than hen’s teeth. Now that AMD finally has a truly competitive part that can take on Bay Trail-T, it would be logical to expect more design wins.

However, thanks to Intel’s ‘contra revenue’ scheme this won’t be easy. Intel insists it’s not doing anything wrong and it doesn’t like it when someone describes its tablet push as a massive subsidy programme. Ultimately, that’s what it really is. Just because Mullins could succeed doesn't mean it actually will.

AMD is not thrilled by the prospect of more Intel subsidies and market development programmes. The company has been dealing with similar Intel shenanigans for almost two decades and it knows it cannot compete on a level playing field. AMD cannot afford to burn hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter to gain a few dozen tablet design wins. Therefore AMD is targeting a somewhat different market, mid-range $299 tablets. Intel is trying to grab everything from $99 to $299 with its tablet SoCs, while Haswell and Broadwell should take care of the higher end of the market.

Intel hopes to ship 40 million tablet parts this year. We don’t know what AMD has in mind, but it is probably not even close to 40 million. It will be tricky, but this time around AMD appears to have a truly competitive product. In addition, not even Intel can afford to keep spending $1bn per year on its tablet push, so we should see its contra revenue taper off moving forward.

Even so, it might give Intel a huge competitive advantage. Intel is on track to quadruple its tablet shipments this year. If it manages to double them next year it will end up with 80+ million units, which seems like a relatively conservative estimate at this point. Intel is stealing design wins from the likes of Mediatek, Rockchip, Nvidia and so on. AMD will have to steal them back from Intel, which sounds a bit more difficult, even with competitive products.

A few days ago AMD leaked a set of interesting press renders to TechRadar, featuring a beefy Windows 8.1 tablet with a dock and some detachable gaming controllers in tow. Dubbed Project Discovery, the tablet is based on AMD’s new Mullins tablet APU and the company told TechRadar that the tablet will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

However, while some sarcastic punters may say this is a case of AMD emulating Nvidia in the sense that it’s building its own tablet to sell tablet chips few vendors want, this is simply not the case. Project Discovery is not an actual product. AMD maintains that it has no plans to launch an own-brand tablet and peripherals, but that doesn’t necessarily mean some of its hardware partners wouldn’t be interested.

But would they be interested? As a gaming tablet, with Windows bloat and an underpowered ultra low voltage chip it doesn’t make much sense. Mullins scores just 570 in 3DMark 11 and although this is 22 percent more than what the Temash based A6-1450 can churn out, it is clearly not enough for serious Windows gaming by any measure. Of course, there are plenty of casual Windows games, but then again developers of such games are focusing their efforts on iOS and Android nowadays.

In other words, the tablet doesn’t have much in common with Nvidia’s Tegra Note 7 or Shield console. It is closer to upcoming Bay Trail-T tablets in terms of hardware. So why the game controller then? Honestly we have no idea, it’s probably just a few designers showing off and getting some press coverage.

However, although everyone is focusing on the gaming aspect of the device, we find the dock a tad more interesting. It is said to use AMD DockPort technology and it’s packed with with USB ports, DisplayPort and HDMI outs and the render even shows what appears to be a LAN connector. In terms of connectivity, that’s what the vast majority of office boxes need.

Also, since AMD appears to be developing a platform with docking in mind from the ground up, much of the tech could be used for keyboard docks, which sounds like a much more tempting proposition for vendors. In essence, we are more interested in the convertible aspect of the device rather than gaming and a desktop dock. A convertible Mullins tablet would make a lot of sense, especially now that the first Bay Trail-T convertibles are starting to show up and Intel is going to great lengths to talk up its “2-in-1” approach.

The gaming angle appears to be in play just to prove a point. Although there’s really no market for ~2W Windows gaming devices regardless of form factor, GPU performance is what AMD hopes to use to differentiate its tablet SoCs from Intel offerings.